I noticed that recently myself. I went to do my monthly check of my emails today and found a ton of Youtube emails about replies to comments. I guess I'll have to go back and check that setting again.

That is one area of improvement they have made. I notice now if you look at them, there is a little tiny dot on the left of the messages that appears next to new ones you have not read.

I went back and checked and I found out the problem. I recently created a new Youtube channel and I needed to check the settings for it. I forgot about that, which lead to my emails. So no, it hasn't changed my settings back which is good.

OH MY GOSH YES. The YouTube interface is COMPLETE CRAP. I'm freaking professional programmer and server administrator AND I CAN'T FIND WHERE REPLIES TO MY COMMENTS ARE. Every time I "think" I find it, I end up at notifications to my channel subscriptions... not actually the comments.

And why do comment replies show the name of the person they're replying to IN PLAIN TEXT at the beginning of the comment? Half the time it's hard to figure out what a comment is because you have to guess which 1/2/3 words are actually a username.

I've actually had conversations with my wife about how frustrating the UI is for a multi-billion dollar company with hundreds of millions (if not >1 billion) users, it's absolutely pathetic. It's like, "Does anyone at your company even use your product?!"

And why is it so inelegant to modify your playlists? Why can't you easily merge them or fork them with a subset? Why can't you easily change many videos without going through TONS of slowly loading heavily-javascripted webpages? If I want to convert my 30+ playlists to public, or private, I have to open each one individually through about three pages of heavy JS loading crap. And why can't my playlists have categories? Whenever I open my own page in the YouTube app, I only want TWO playlists to show (or at least have them FIRST), but no, the app DEFAULTS to "playlist with most recently added video" ends up at the top. So I have to scroll through ~20+ playlists, "Randomly ordered" (by most recent addition), just to get the two I always pick.

There's no way in hell I'm buying YouTube Red until they provide a proper UI, and stop shitting on non-politically correct videos/channels.

[edit] And WTF are they doing with the UI? Every time they change it.. IT GETS WORSE. I just loaded it up and here it's changed again. My playlist view has NO GRID SEPERATORS and NO COLOR CHANGES between videos. So it's just white... with tons of text. So it's even harder to tell the "border" between one grid/table cell from the next when scrolling or on a large, low DPI screen. (MINE!) And until the thumbnails load (which is super slow for some reason) all they show is TEXT. The thumbnail background is pure white (no placeholder) until it pops up. So I get like 5 thumbnails, and then nothing but text as I keep scrolling. And the playlist only shows THREE or so listings below the video I'm playing. So if I have a list with 670 videos, you think 3 is gonna be easy to pick from? It's like a flashback from Cable TV's "TV Guide Channel" where you got a huge ad and then a tiny two or three cells of scrolling text to try and read what shows might be playing.

{"name":"Ee77eqU.png","src":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/8\/a\/8a5349c5f6a343b76eb195ee1aa801cd.png","w":960,"h":995,"tn":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/8\/a\/8a5349c5f6a343b76eb195ee1aa801cd"}

No grid lines and talk about wasted space!

{"name":"hqdefault.jpg","src":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/8\/f\/8f257d66a5a8cabea35c928b220c506f.jpg","w":480,"h":360,"tn":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/8\/f\/8f257d66a5a8cabea35c928b220c506f"}

If I was a manager/lead developer at YouTube I would be pulling someone into my office for a "discussion" and demand explanations for the changes.